In a move that should put a dent in the global shortage of trained Hadoop professionals while boosting its own corporate citizenship image, MapR Technologies, Inc. today announced that it is giving away $50 million in in-kind training services via an online learning platform that anyone can access.

The initial curriculum includes seven self-paced courses to be rolled during the first quarter and aimed primarily at developers and data analysts. All will be available online and can be taken individually or as part of one of three “learning paths” that MapR has defined for developers, analysts and administrators.

For example, the Developer Learning Path curriculum includes five courses covering Hadoop Essentials, Developing Hadoop Applications, HBase Schema Design and Modeling, Developing HBase Applications and Hadoop Data Analysis using Drill. Participants can also take certification exams for $250 each through a MapR partnership with Innovative Exams, a certification and training proctoring company.

The seven courses mirror MapR’s own classroom training topics and require between eight and 16 hours to complete, according to Jack Norris, MapR’s chief marketing officer. “It’s a full in-depth classroom track that will lead to certification,” he told SiliconANGLE in an interview. Most of the course content was developed by MapR trainers and support staff.

Norris said MapR’s motivations in developing the giveaway were strictly altruistic. “We think it’s a great way to spur continued adoption of Hadoop,” he said. “We hope students go further with us but there’s no requirement.”

The $50 million valuation the company put on the program reflects the estimated value of $1,750 for each course and 30,000 courses completed. MapR’s actual investment is much lower.

However, the dollar commitment is an estimate and not a cap, Norris emphasized. No end date has been set for the program and MapR expects to continue to add programs to the curriculum. “All of these courses will be free, and if 25,000 people or 100,000 people take them, we’re prepared to handle it,” he said.

MapR also has no plans to use the program as a lead generation mechanism, the executive said. The company will gather some basic contact information upon registration and will extend opt-in offers to students, but no salesman will call. “When you go through this training you can leverage any Hadoop platform,” Norris said. “It’s not exclusive to MapR.”

Experts differ on the extent of the Big Data skills shortage. McKinsey & Co. has estimated that the U.S. alone could face a shortage of up to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills by 2018. However, Forrester Research, Inc.’s Mike Gualtieri recently said the big data skills crisis will soon resolve itself.  “It is a file system, albeit distributed, and it is a computing platform, albeit distributed,” he wrote in November. “What’s the big deal?”

MapR is hoping it’s a big deal, indeed. The horse race among the three well-funded startups competing in the market has so far been defined mainly by dollars-and-cents criteria. MapR hopes this initiative will boost his reputation as a good corporate citizen, which is of particular value in the open source community.